There’s a lot of talk, especially in light of the developments of recent years, about retirement. Unfortunately, many people have lost much of their retirement nest eggs due to problems in real estate or in the stock market.

I received an interesting note the other day from a long-time friend, Dana Borowka, of Lighthouse Consulting, in Santa Monica, California. He offered a different view of retirement. Here is what he wrote:

“Last week I was thinking about retirement and what it means. The thought came – what am I going to retire from? Then the idea came – Today I’m retiring from fear and stress! I’ve shared that with a few people and the look on everyone’s face is – of course. They loved it.”

With traditional credit channels squeezed so much that even the bank of mom and dad is tightening its belt, social lending services have moved beyond typical peer-to-peer to target the inter-family space, as Ian Clover discovered.

Tired of burning your tongue on coffee only to have it get cold a few minutes later? With the Coffee Joulies Gift Pack your coffee will be ready to drink in minutes and will stay that way for hours. Each polished stainless steel shell is filled with a special phase change material that melts at 140°F. Put them inside the custom-printed thermos and they absorb heat from your coffee when it is too hot and release it back into your coffee to keep it at the perfect temperature.

With financial institutions throughout the country striving to cater for the broadest base of consumers possible, mobile banking is an increasingly competitive industry. But how can FIs grow their mobile banking operations in a way that best suits them and their customers?

The recent outbreak of alternative financial transaction services hasn’t yet caused giants like PayPal and Ebay to need reputation protection, but they may be looking to revamp their business models soon. The new kid on the block, Dwolla, threatens to shake things up in an industry that seems to change by the year.

For big companies going online in the ’90s, the Internet was a shocker, laying bare all the silos within their organizations, as those units communicated directly to customers, with no homogenizing layer of customer service in between. So, if each of your business units had a different system for processing returns, it was no longer the poor telephone rep who had to deal with the crazy systems, now it was your customers.

The two-year, $9 million project will create a suite of algorithms that can detect multiple types of insider threats by analyzing massive amounts of data — including email, text messages and file transfers — for unusual activity.

Last Tuesday, when I spoke for a great group of CEO’s in Milwaukee, I noticed something very interesting. It was a good example of how some people take customer service to a whole new level and make a very positive impression.

The event was held at the Hilton Garden Inn, on West Park Place, at the Good Hope Road exit on Routes 41/45.

The meeting was in a part of the ballroom. Outside the room the hotel had set up a buffet for lunch for the group. While everyone was having lunch, and discussing some business issues, I noticed that the young lady taking care of the group was very attentive.

She smiled, was courteous, and yet very quiet as she cleared plates when people were through with their lunch.

And then I noticed something interesting about her. She wore white gloves.